The Evolution of Man — Volume 2

by Ernst Haeckel

If we hold firmly to this fundamental and most important thesis, we shall see the "ape-question" in a very different light from that in which it is usually regarded. Little reflection is then needed to see that it is not nearly so important as it is said to be. The origin of the human race from a series of mammal ancestors, and the historic evolution of these from an earlier series of lower vertebrate ancestors, together with all the weighty conclusions that every thoughtful man deduces therefrom, remain untouched; so far as these are concerned, it is immaterial whether we regard true "apes" as our nearest ancestors or not. But as it has become the fashion to lay the chief stress in the whole question of man's origin on the "descent from the apes," I am compelled to return to it once more, and recall the facts of comparative anatomy and ontogeny that give a decisive answer to this "ape-question."

The shortest way to attain our purpose is that followed by Huxley in 1863 in his able work, which I have already often quoted, Man's Place in Nature—the way of comparative anatomy and ontogeny. We have to compare impartially all man's organs with the same organs in the higher apes, and then to examine if the differences between the two are greater than the corresponding differences between the higher and the lower apes. The indubitable and incontestable result of this comparative-anatomical study, conducted with the greatest care and impartiality, was the pithecometra-principle, which we have called the Huxleian law in honour of its formulator—namely, that the differences in organisation between man and the most advanced apes we know are much slighter than the corresponding differences in organisation between the higher and lower apes. We may even give a more precise formula to this law, by excluding the Platyrrhines or American apes as distant relatives, and restricting the comparison to the narrower family-circle of the Catarrhines, the apes of the Old World. Within the limits of this small group of mammals we found the structural differences between the lower and higher catarrhine apes—for instance, the baboon and the gorilla—to be much greater than the differences between the anthropoid apes and man. If we now turn to ontogeny, and find, according to our "law of the ontogenetic connection of systematically related forms," that the embryos of the anthropoid apes and man retain their resemblance for a longer time than the embryos of the highest and the lowest apes, we are forced, whether we like it or no, to recognise our descent from the order of apes. We can assuredly construct an approximate picture in the imagination of the form of our early Tertiary ancestors from the foregoing facts of comparative anatomy; however we may frame this in detail, it will be the picture of a true ape, and a distinct catarrhine ape. This has been shown so well by Huxley (1863) that the recent attacks of Klaatsch, Virchow, and other anthropologists, have completely failed (cf. Chapter 2.23). All the structural characters that distinguish the Catarrhines from the Platyrrhines are found in man. Hence in the genealogy of the mammals we must derive man immediately from the catarrhine group, and locate the origin of the human race in the Old World. Only the early root-form from which both descended was common to them.

It is, therefore, established beyond question for all impartial scientific inquiry that the human race comes directly from the apes of the Old World; but, at the same time, I repeat that this is not so important in connection with the main question of the origin of man as is commonly supposed. Even if we entirely ignore it, all that we have learned from the zoological facts of comparative anatomy and ontogeny as to the placental character of man remains untouched. These prove beyond all doubt the common descent of man and all the rest of the mammals. Further, the main question is not in the least affected if it is said: "It is true that man is a mammal; but he has diverged at the very root of the class from all the other mammals, and has no closer relationship to any living group of mammals." The affinity is more or less close in any case, if we examine the relation of the mammal class to the sixty other classes of the animal world. Quite certainly the whole of the mammals, including man, have had a common origin; and it is equally certain that their common stem-forms were gradually evolved from a long series of lower Vertebrates.

The resistance to the theory of a descent from the apes is clearly due in most men to feeling rather than to reason. They shrink from the notion of such an origin just because they see in the ape organism a caricature of man, a distorted and unattractive image of themselves, because it hurts man's aesthetic complacency and self-ennoblement. It is more flattering to think we have descended from some lofty and god-like being; and so, from the earliest times, human vanity has been pleased to believe in our origin from gods or demi-gods. The Church, with that sophistic reversal of ideas of which it is a master, has succeeded in representing this ridiculous piece of vanity as "Christian humility"; and the very men who reject with horror the notion of an animal origin, and count themselves "children of God," love to prate of their "humble sense of servitude." In most of the sermons that have poured out from pulpit and altar against the doctrine of evolution human vanity and conceit have been a conspicuous element; and, although we have inherited this very characteristic weakness from the apes, we must admit that we have developed it to a higher degree, which is entirely repudiated by sound and normal intelligence. We are greatly amused at all the childish follies that the ridiculous pride of ancestry has maintained from the Middle Ages to our own time; yet there is a large amount of this empty feeling in most men. Just as most people much prefer to trace their family back to some degenerate baron or some famous prince rather than to an unknown peasant, so most men would rather have as parent of the race a sinful and fallen Adam than an advancing, and vigorous ape. It is a matter of taste, and to that extent we cannot quarrel over these genealogical tendencies. Personally, the notion of ascent is more congenial to me than that of descent. It seems to me a finer thing to be the advanced offspring of a simian ancestor, that has developed progressively from the lower mammals in the struggle for life, than the degenerate descendant of a god-like being, made from a clod, and fallen for his sins, and an Eve created from one of his ribs. Speaking of the rib, I may add to what I have said about the development of the skeleton, that the number of ribs is just the same in man and woman. In both of them the ribs are formed from the middle germinal layer, and are, from the phylogenetic point of view, lower or ventral vertebral arches.

But it is said: "That is all very well, as far as the human body is concerned; on the facts quoted it is impossible to doubt that it has really and gradually been evolved from the long ancestral series of the Vertebrates. But it is quite another thing as regards man's mind, or soul; this cannot possibly have been developed from the vertebrate-soul."* (* The English reader will recognise here the curious position of Dr. Wallace and of the late Dr. Mivart.—Translator.) Let us see if we cannot meet this grave stricture from the well-known facts of comparative anatomy, physiology, and embryology. It will be best to begin with a comparative study of the souls of various groups of Vertebrates. Here we find such an enormous variety of vertebrate souls that, at first sight, it seems quite impossible to trace them all to a common "Primitive Vertebrate." Think of the tiny Amphioxus, with no real brain but a simple medullary tube, and its whole psychic life at the very lowest stage among the Vertebrates. The following group of the Cyclostomes are still very limited, though they have a brain. When we pass on to the fishes, we find their intelligence remaining at a very low level. We do not see any material advance in mental development until we go on to the Amphibia and Reptiles. There is still greater advance when we come to the Mammals, though even here the minds of the Monotremes and of the stupid Marsupials remain at a low stage. But when we rise from these to the Placentals we find within this one vast group such a number of important stages of differentiation and progress that the psychic differences between the least intelligent (such as the sloths and armadillos) and the most intelligent Placentals (such as the dogs and apes) are much greater than the psychic differences between the lowest Placentals and the Marsupials or Monotremes. Most certainly the differences are far greater than the differences in mental power between the dog, the ape, and man. Yet all these animals are genetically-related members of a single natural class.

We see this to a still more astonishing extent in the comparative psychology of another class of animals, that is especially interesting for many reasons—the insect class. It is well known that we find in many insects a degree of intelligence that is found in man alone among the Vertebrates. Everybody knows of the famous communities and states of bees and ants, and of the very remarkable social arrangements in them, such as we find among the more advanced races of men, but among no other group of animals. I need only mention the social organisation and government of the monarchic bees and the republican ants, and their division into different conditions—queen, drone-nobles, workers, educators, soldiers, etc. One of the most remarkable phenomena in this very interesting province is the cattle-keeping of the ants, which rear plant-lice as milch-cows and regularly extract their honeyed juice. Still more remarkable is the slave-holding of the large red ants, which steal the young of the small black ants and bring them up as slaves. It has long been known that these political and social arrangements of the ants are due to the deliberate cooperation of the countless citizens, and that they understand each other. A number of recent observers, especially Fritz Muller, Sir J. Lubbock (Lord Avebury), and August Forel, have put the astonishing degree of intelligence of these tiny Articulates beyond question.

Now, compare with these the mental life of many of the lower, especially the parasitic insects, as Darwin did. There is, for instance, the cochineal insect (Coccus), which, in its adult state, has a motionless, shield-shaped body, attached to the leaves of plants. Its feet are atrophied. Its snout is sunk in the tissue of the plants of which it absorbs the sap. The whole psychic life of these inert female parasites consists in the pleasure they experience from sucking the sap of the plant and in sexual intercourse with the males. It is the same with the maggot-like females of the fan-fly (Strepsitera), which spend their lives parasitically and immovably, without wings or feet, in the abdomen of wasps. There is no question here of higher psychic action. If we compare these sluggish parasites with the intelligent and active ants, we must admit that the psychic differences between them are much greater than the psychic differences between the lowest and highest mammals, between the Monotremes, Marsupials, and armadillos on the one hand, and the dog, ape, or man on the other. Yet all these insects belong to the same class of Articulates, just as all the mammals belong to one and the same class. And just as every consistent evolutionist must admit a common stem-form for all these insects, so he must also for all the mammals.

If we now turn from the comparative study of psychic life in different animals to the question of the organs of this function, we receive the answer that in all the higher animals they are always bound up with certain groups of cells, the ganglionic cells or neurona that compose the nervous system. All scientists without exception are agreed that the central nervous system is the organ of psychic life in the animal, and it is possible to prove this experimentally at any moment. When we partially or wholly destroy the central nervous system, we extinguish in the same proportion, partially or wholly, the "soul" or psychic activity of the animal. We have, therefore, to examine the features of the psychic organ in man. The reader already knows the incontestable answer to this question. Man's psychic organ is, in structure and origin, just the same organ as in all the other Vertebrates. It originates in the shape of a simple medullary tube from the outer membrane of the embryo—the skin-sense layer. The simple cerebral vesicle that is formed by the expansion of the head-part of this medullary tube divides by transverse constrictions into five, and these pass through more or less the same stages of construction in the human embryo as in the rest of the mammals. As these are undoubtedly of a common origin, their brain and spinal cord must also have a common origin.

Physiology teaches us further, on the ground of observation and experiment, that the relation of the "soul" to its organ, the brain and spinal cord, is just the same in man as in the other mammals. The one cannot act at all without the other; it is just as much bound up with it as muscular movement is with the muscles. It can only develop in connection with it. If we are evolutionists at all, and grant the causal connection of ontogenesis and phylogenesis, we are forced to admit this thesis: The human soul or psyche, as a function of the medullary tube, has developed along with it; and just as brain and spinal cord now develop from the simple medullary tube in every human individual, so the human mind or the psychic life of the whole human race has been gradually evolved from the lower vertebrate soul. Just as to-day the intricate structure of the brain proceeds step by step from the same rudiment in every human individual—the same five cerebral vesicles—as in all the other Craniotes; so the human soul has been gradually developed in the course of millions of years from a long series of craniote-souls. Finally, just as to-day in every human embryo the various parts of the brain differentiate after the special type of the ape-brain, so the human psyche has proceeded historically from the ape-soul.

It is true that this Monistic conception is rejected with horror by most men, and the Dualistic idea, which denies the inseparable connection of brain and mind, and regards body and soul as two totally different things, is still popular. But how can we reconcile this view with the known facts of evolution? It meets with difficulties equally great and insuperable in embryology and in phylogeny. If we suppose with the majority of men that the soul is an independent entity, which has nothing to do with the body originally, but merely inhabits it for a time, and gives expression to its experiences through the brain just as the pianist does through his instrument, we must assign a point in human embryology at which the soul enters into the brain; and at death again we must assign a moment at which it abandons the body. As, further, each human individual has inherited certain personal features from each parent, we must suppose that in the act of conception pieces were detached from their souls and transferred to the embryo. A piece of the paternal soul goes with-the spermatozoon, and a piece of the mother's soul remains in the ovum. At the moment of conception, when portions of the two nuclei of the copulating cells join together to form the nucleus of the stem-cell, the accompanying fragments of the immaterial souls must also be supposed to coalesce.